Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

The Week Ending March 27

This week's roundup of companies that came to win include FinancialForce.com raising $110 million in financing, Apple buying database developer FoundationDB, ProfitBricks upping the cloud ante, Dell making some key exec hires and a 25-year-old wunderkind CEO.

FinancialForce.Com Raises $110 Million In Financing

There have been some big venture capital wins in the IT industry in recent months, but few have cracked the $100 million threshold. This week, cloud application vendor FinancialForce.com got everyone's attention when it raised $110 million in financing. Investors included new investor Technology Crossover Ventures, as well as Salesforce.com's investment group, which provided some of the company's $50 million first round of funding last year.

CEO Jeremy Roche told CRN the company will use the money to expand its go-to-market efforts, including building its channel initiatives. Last year, FinancialForce, which provides back-office financial cloud applications, said sales reached a $50 million run-rate with a 91 percent subscription run-rate growth.

Apple Reportedly Buys FoundationDB Database Developer

Apple acquired FoundationDB, a developer of high-performance NoSQL database technology, according to numerous published reports this week.

The FoundationDB software is designed to handle huge volumes of financial transactions while complying with ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability) standards that ensure data integrity.

Apple was staying mum about its plans for the FoundationDB software. But it's a good bet this was a savvy move to acquire a key piece of back-office technology the company will need if its Apple Pay service takes off the way it expects.

ProfitBricks Throws Down The Gauntlet

Upstart IaaS provider ProfitBricks made a bold, perhaps even brash, proclamation, saying it will beat any price for comparable cloud services running any workload on Amazon's, Microsoft's or Google's clouds.

The company, which has headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., and Berlin, posted the guarantee to its website this week, as detailed in a CRN report.

ProfitBricks' gambit may seem almost imprudent when viewed in the context of the ongoing price war rivals Amazon, Microsoft and Google have waged over the last two years. However, in an admirable show of moxie, ProfitBricks co-founder Andreas Gauger told CRN that the price war among the three industry giants is nothing more than a misconception among cloud buyers.

Dell Pushes Data Center Accelerator With High-Profile Exec Hires

Dell certainly came to win this week, announcing Monday that it had hired two industry veterans to its executive ranks as it pushes the accelerator on its data center efforts.

The Austin, Texas-based company said Rory Read (pictured), the former CEO of AMD, would become chief operating officer and president of worldwide commercial sales, overseeing Dell's omnichannel sales planning and enablement strategy.

Cisco Systems wunderkind Paul Perez was made chief technology officer of Dell's Enterprise Solutions Group. Dell channel partners praised the move, saying Perez is a rock-solid enterprise exec with the ability to streamline and supercharge the company's data center strategy.

Perez: Our Track Record, Certifications Speak For Themselves

We get the sense that Carlos Perez comes to win every week.

At just 25 years old, Perez sits at the helm of Perez Technology Group, the Hartford, Conn.-based solution provider he started when he was 17 and still in high school.

Perez provides cloud and IT infrastructure services to small and midsize businesses, primarily marketing firms and law offices, and he told CRN that he stands out because he can deliver enterprise-grade solutions to the SMB market. The result is that Perez's clients don't just get help-desk services -- they get more productive, they reduce costs up to 35 percent, they automate, design their networks, become BYOD-friendly and secure their environments.

Perez is one of the younger leaders in the channel, but he doesn't let that stop him when approaching new clients or executing on projects. His company's track record and certifications, he said, speak for themselves.